LeadTribe Cohort III: It's still Day 1

Last weekend, we concluded Cohort III of our annual Lead Tribe, a cohort-based learning and networking program for early-stage female founders. Started and conceptualised in 2020 by Radhika Agarwal, our goal with Lead Tribe was to solve the obvious founder gender gap in the startup ecosystem.

Every year, we begin the program by repeating some numbers not because we are cynical about change, but because change isn't an overnight phenomenon.

• 7 out of 100 entrepreneurs in India are women.
• 15% of Indian unicorns have at least one female founder.
• between 2014–2021 women-led startups raised barely $9.4 Bn in funding, which is 8.4% of the total $112Bn raised by Indian startups.
• India ranks 70th among the 77 countries covered in the Female Entrepreneurship Index.

Lead Tribe was born out of our commitment to fix this and be a part of the solution. Over the last two cohorts, we've had over 50+ incredible early-stage founders go through our program and find mentors who could help them on their 0-10 journeys, land customers for their products, discover investors who support them, and most importantly make friends for life.

This year, we took things up a notch.

What Changed This Year

Before starting LeadTribe, we had many conversations with founders across the extended Blume network to narrow down one constantly repeating pain point we hoped to solve with LeadTribe. What held back women-led startups the most was a lack of access to networks that men had.

When we started it in 2021, the pandemic was in full swing – so the first two cohorts were designed to be online first.

This year we flipped the script.

We wanted to enhance the experience by creating an offline-first program: years of building community and peer networks among founders had taught us that there is little-to-no substitute for offline experiences in forging deeper bonds between participants.

That's why we changed the format of the third cohort to one centred around an in-person boot camp.

Over five weeks, we had four online sessions which ended with a private, closed-circle sprint of 10 in-person sessions in Bangalore on 23-24 June 2023. We had 23+ founders from across India attending insightful sessions by founders and operators on PMF, hiring, fundraising, scaling the content marketing function, plus more. 

“I still carry my notebook with my notes from the cohort,” said Isha Sapra of ausper, who was a part of last year’s cohort. “After last year’s sessions, I built repeatability in the product and also caught early PMF signals. I don’t think I would have tought those had it not been for Lead Tribe.”

This year we met founders who’re automating interviews through voicetech AI, building a financial empowerment platform for the blue-collar workforce, and reinventing the traditional Indianwear supply chain. These are founders from all over the country moving fast and breaking things across ed-tech, fintech, enterprise saas, health-tech.

Safe to say we had incredible fun hosting these founders! And we think they did too as indicated by our post bootcamp feedback form. Our NPS score for the program was at >95%

Decade long pursuit

Our goal with Lead Tribe was to create a community of founders who'd both give to and take from the network and help propel each other forward. We wouldn’t have been able to get this far without the founders, operators, and investors who've been kind enough to invest their time and efforts towards supporting LeadTribe. We need as much help as possible because this will be a decade-long pursuit. It could be longer. Attempting to change the status quo across ecosystems as large and complex as ours generally does.

Along the way, we continue to pursue our mission of helping founders build game-changing startups by leveraging strong support networks that in small and big ways could help increase their likelihood of success.

It’s still Day One.

Here's the list of our rockstar cohort III founders